| Agency Outreach Team |
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Contact Information
PersonnelCharlie Denton received his education in forest management from the School of Forestry at NAU. He worked as district resource staff on the Coronado, Kaibab and Gila National Forests for ten years before becoming district ranger on the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, where he worked for 17 years. He has been with the ERI since 2001, and currently serves as a senior program coordinator. Dennis Lund studied forest management at the University of California Berkeley. He worked over 40 years in Arizona in various positions including forester, district ranger, land exchange coordinator, and staff officer on the Kaibab National Forest for 23 years. He joined the ERI in 2003, and currently serves as a senior program coordinator. Dave Brewer received his B.S. in resource management, zoology and soil science from the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point. He worked as a field soil scientist in Shiprock, New Mexico, and in Arizona on the Kaibab National Forest for nearly a decade. He then held the position of district range staff on the Kaibab for ten years and range and watershed program manager on the Kaibab for another decade. Dave joined the ERI team in October 2006 as a program coordinator. HistoryThe ERI's agency outreach efforts began when ERI Director W. Wallace Covington assigned then ERI staff member, Hiram “Doc” Smith, with the job of agency outreach. Wally gave Doc, who was another former Forest Service employee, the job of acting as a liason between forestry researchers at the ERI and federal agency land managers. The idea was to make research findings easier to digest and more useful to those implementing changes in the field. Charlie joined in December 2000, when requests for information increased, and the ERI's Agency Outreach Team was formed. The Agency Outreach Team members are all Forest Service retirees, who have extensive breadth and depth of experience in developing and implementing resource treatment projects.
ServicesThe Agency Outreach Team helps practitioners in project planning by offering approaches that are based on the best available scientific research and years of practical experience in forestry-related matters. The team reviews and uses both internal (ERI published) and external research materials related to the ecological restoration of southwestern forests. This includes items such as proper methods for thinning overstocked forests, fuels management, restoration of understory plants, and soil management, to mention a few. This research and other related documents are compiled into a Traveling Library. Agency Outreach Team members have compiled this information, which they take to meetings with practitioners so that the research can be easily referred to during consultations and/or distributed. The team strives to help agencies make science-informed decisions using all available materials. Working with other ERI staff, the team evaluates and condenses important research papers into usable summaries, such as Desired Future Conditions (DFC) Fact Sheets (see below). The team also work with their ERI colleagues to produce ERI Working Papers (see below), which bring together information about restoration topics. The Agency Outreach Team holds two- to three-day workshops to present information relevant to practitioners. Past workshops have been offered in every national forest in Region 3. These workshops examined topics such as the principles of ecological restoration, recognizing pre-European settlement evidence, and evaluating treatment methods and their effectiveness. About half of the workshop time is spent in a classroom, while the other half is spent looking at and discussing work at project sites and/or demo plots. The team welcomes topic suggestions. For example, they were recently approached with a request to hold a workshop to discuss the northern goshawk guidelines. Types of InformationThe team provides the following information about southwestern ponderosa pine, mixed conifer, pinyon-juniper, and chaparral ecosystems:
Partial List of Past Projects
PublicationsFact Sheets-DFC ConsiderationsMost Referenced ERI Working Papers:
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